If you are familiar with Model-Driven apps, then I am sure you have heard or used Business Process Flow to define a process for the ease of your customers. Traditionally, in Dynamics 365 or in a Model-Driven app, here’s how we can define and use BPF:
1. Create a Model-Driven App or use an existing one.
2. Create a new or use an existing Entity in CDS.
3. Define a new BPF based on one of the CDS Entity.
4. Add this new BPF in a Model-Driven App.
Now, we can use this BPF for any record created on the base CDS entity.
What is Business Process Flow Immersive Experience? 🤔
The Immersive Business Process flow is a new way of defining and using BPF without defining any Model-Driven app and entity. So if we want to get the BPF without any dependency of Model-Driven app, then new Immersive BPF is here to help.
The main features of Immersive Business Process flow are:
- They don’t require Model-Driven apps
- We can now use the new form designer to fully customize the appearance of business process flows, including using custom controls with the Power Apps Control Framework.
- Share and assign runs to coworkers and teams to collaborate
- These are suited to model human-driven processes for specific roles and functions
- We can use these to model multi-stage approval, contract review processes, after meeting debriefs and many more
As it is a premium feature, it requires CDS and Flow Plan 2.
Check out the latest licensing model to get more accurate information.
Create an Immersive Business Process
As we now know that these Immersive BPF are not directly based on Model-Driven apps, so how do we create them? How do we use them?
Well, we have to define, control and use them from Power Automate. You may treat them like on-demand flows.
- We will navigate to Power Automate and then we will click on Business process flow, as shown below.
2. The key here is that while defining the BPF, select None (Immersive Business Process) in the Choose an Entity option.
3. This is open a BPF designer in a new tab. Now, you can click on any stage and then Click to add fields and forms to add new fields and define the form.
Immersive Busniess Process flow will create a CDS entity in the background to keep history of all the flows. We can necessary fields, PCF controls and Canvas Apps as per our need.
4. I am going to add a few fields in the entity for the demo purpose.
5. Once we are done with the fields, we can click Save Entity.
Bonus Facts:
Please let me know if I have missed something.
1. The newly created fields are highlighted as Bold in Power Apps Solution Editor. They are stored in memory temporarily and can be reverted back easily.
2. Save Entity will Save the Changes which is like Publish.
3. Discard will remove all the changes made since last Save event.
6. Last but not least, we need to design the form as per our need and publish it.
At the time of writing this post, the form designer for Immersive BPF was not available for me, so I used classic form designer to add fields on the form.
How to Use or Run these Immersive Business Flows?
Now the fun part. We have defined our BPF and now we are ready to use them. Traditionally, we used to create a new record in a CDS entity and the BPF defined for that entity will be attached to that record.
Here we can just navigate to My Flows, then to Business process flows tab and then we can simply click on Run button of the new Immersive Business Process flow.
It will open up an Immersive BPF in a new window and we can create a record, move to different stages and so on.
To access an existing/running Immersive BPF record, we can navigate to Business Process flows under Action Items and open the record. We can also share, abandon (deactivate) or delete that record.
I hope I have given you enough summary to think about this feature and you will consider checking it out. It might be a little tricky to find the use case of Immersive BPF if you are used to traditional BPF, like me.
But I am sure with the addition of PCF controls, upcoming new vertical layout to dock BPF to the side of the existing content and BPF in mobile offline, Immersive Business process flows will be of great use.
Till next time, Cheers 😉
Can we only create BPF (Immersive Experience) outside of the solution? (instead of creating outside and Add Existing from Process)
I want to create the BPF instance entity with the correc solution publisher prefix rather than just new_